The world in 400 BC

Africa

Amyrtaeus of Sais led an Egyptian revolt against Persian rule that began in 404 BC, the year Darius II died, and Jona Lendering of Livius.org counts him as the only pharaoh of the Twenty-eighth Dynasty. A loan contract from Elephantine, possibly dated to the fifth year of his reign, suggests that he controlled Upper Egypt by 400 BC, although his kingdom stayed unstable and he left no monuments. In 398 BC he was removed by Nepherites I of Mendes, in the eastern Delta, who founded the Twenty-ninth Dynasty and kept an alliance with Sparta under which Egypt was to send grain and equipment for a hundred warships. Persian campaigns to retake the country in 389–387 and 374–373 BC failed.

• Meroë's royal pyramids and the gold Ferlini took in 1834300 BC
• Which Dynasty's Harbor Held One of the Seven Wonders of the World?280 BC

West Asia

Cyrus the Younger, satrap of western Asia Minor, marched on Babylon in 401 BC with a force that included 10,000 Greek mercenaries, in abundant supply since the end of the Peloponnesian War, and on September 3 he met his brother’s army at Cunaxa, a village about 50 miles north of Babylon, where he was killed. Xenophon, an Athenian who fought on Cyrus’s side, passed on reports that the king went into battle with 900,000 men; A. Sh. Shahbazi, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, argues that Xenophon multiplied Cyrus’s own numbers by 100 and prefers Eduard Meyer’s estimate of nearly 40,000. On the retreat that followed, Xenophon wrote, the vanguard reached the top of a mountain called Theches, and as Xenophon rode up from the rearguard he heard the soldiers shouting “The Sea! The Sea!” Sparta, which had sided with Cyrus, was at war with the king’s satraps from 400 BC.

• How did Persia run the largest empire the world had seen?500 BC
• A cylinder from Babylon, 1879: a building text called a rights charter539 BC

Europe

Athens had surrendered in 404 BC, demolished its long walls and lived under “the Thirty,” an elected oligarchy that seized property and carried out executions until democrats returned in 403 BC and a new legal era was proclaimed. In the spring of 399 BC a young poet named Meletus charged Socrates with irreverence, and in May or June a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death, a trial that Debra Nails and Sara Monoson reconstruct largely from Plato’s dialogues. Diodorus Siculus recorded that Dionysius I, planning war on Carthage, had some sixty thousand men wall the heights of Epipolae above Syracuse, a wall thirty stades long finished in twenty days. North of the Alps the La Tène culture had emerged in the second half of the fifth century BC, and Erica Piccirilli and her coauthors write that Celtic migrations reached Italy and Pannonia at the beginning of the fourth century BC, as Livy and Justin also reported.

• Could Anyone Give Absolute Power Back? The Story of Cincinnatus458 BC
• How Did a 20-Year-Old Conquer the World?336 BC
• Can Half an Army Beat Hundreds of Thousands?331 BC
• The Empire Split — So Why Did They Speak Greek All the Way to India?323 BC

East Asia

Rival states divided China in the Warring States era, which Chris Fraser dates from 479 to 221 BC, a time when the larger states each hoped to conquer their neighbors and unify the realm. Mozi, “Master Mo,” most likely flourished in the middle to late decades of the fifth century BC, and little is known of him; the Han-dynasty Shi Ji says only that he was an official of the state of Song. His followers condemned unprovoked aggression, yet some became specialists in defensive warfare who went to the aid of threatened cities, and the movement flourished in the fourth and third centuries BC.

South Asia

At Wari-Bateshwar, beside a former channel of the Brahmaputra in what is now Bangladesh, the main occupation of a fortified settlement began in the middle of the first millennium BC, and two rice grains from the site are radiocarbon dated to 400–230 BC and 400–255 BC. Mizanur Rahman and his coauthors connect Bangladesh’s Iron Age, about the fifth to first century BC, with the Northern Black Polished Ware of Early Historic northern India, a period when large urban sites appeared in parts of Bangladesh. Finds from Wari-Bateshwar include punch-marked coins, etched carnelian beads, iron tools and knives, and an outer wall, locally called Asom Rajar Garh, that runs 5.75 kilometers.

• Why did an emperor carve his regret for a war into rock across India?260 BC

Central Asia

On the Ukok Plateau in the southern Altai, 2,200 to 2,500 meters above sea level near today’s borders of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, people of the Pazyryk culture buried their dead in kurgans, some of which lay in permafrost that preserved two mummies and objects of organic material. Records from 2003 list horse remains in 212 of 569 excavated Pazyryk kurgans. Nadezhda Vorobieva and her colleagues date the two Pazyryk horses they sequenced, from Ak-Alakha and Verkh-Kaldzhin, to the late fourth and early third centuries BC, and one carried a mitochondrial type found in no other ancient or modern horse.

• What did the frozen tombs of the Altai preserve for 2,400 years?400 BC
• A Corinthian capital on the Oxus: the Greek city of Ai Khanoum250 BC

The Americas

The Olmec center of La Venta, whose plaza complexes Ivan Šprajc, Takeshi Inomata and Anthony Aveni date probably to 800–400 BC, stood at the close of the Middle Formative; in their chronology the Late Formative runs from about 400 BC to AD 200. On the south coast of Peru, the Paracas culture, which developed around 800 BC and lasted until around 200 BC, was entering the late phase that Henry Tantaleán and his colleagues date to 400–200 BC. At Cerro del Gentil in the Chincha Valley, a sunken patio that Paracas people had built as early as 550 BC was used for several centuries for feasting and offerings before a final deposit closed it.

Oceania

Teouma, on the island of Efate in Vanuatu, holds the oldest cemetery in Remote Oceania, and a sediment core from the nearby Emaotfer swamp shows a second phase of human presence and taro growing that began between 2602 and 2400 calibrated years before present and ended between 2477 and 2298. Giorgia Camperio and her colleagues note that after 2300 years before present no archaeological trace of occupation has been found at Teouma, which appears to have stayed empty until a coconut plantation was planted there in the early 20th century. Nothing was written down anywhere in the Pacific islands in this period, and the dates rest on radiocarbon measurements.

• 1,800 years in Tonga and Samoa: the long pause before East Polynesia500 BC

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Rüdiger Schmitt: "Artaxerxes II" (1986)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. Sh. Shahbazi: "Cunaxa" (1993)
• Perseus Digital Library, Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7.21 (translated by Carleton L. Brownson, 1922)
• Perseus Digital Library, Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7.24 (translated by Carleton L. Brownson, 1922)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Amyrtaeus"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Nepherites I"
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Debra Nails and S. Sara Monoson: "Socrates" (revised 2022)
• LacusCurtius, University of Chicago, Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 14.18 (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 6, 1954)
• PLOS One 18(10) via PubMed Central, Erica Piccirilli et al.: "New insights on Celtic migration in Hungary and Italy through the analysis of non-metric dental traits" (2023)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chris Fraser: "Mohism" (revised 2024)
• Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 12(1) via PubMed Central, Mizanur Rahman et al.: "Agricultural systems in Bangladesh: the first archaeobotanical results from Early Historic Wari-Bateshwar and Early Medieval Vikrampura" (2020)
• PLOS One 15(11) via PubMed Central, Nadezhda V. Vorobieva et al.: "High genetic diversity of ancient horses from the Ukok Plateau" (2020)
• Science Advances 9(1) via PubMed Central, Ivan Šprajc, Takeshi Inomata and Anthony F. Aveni: "Origins of Mesoamerican astronomy and calendar: Evidence from the Olmec and Maya regions" (2023)
• PLOS One 11(5) via PubMed Central, Henry Tantaleán et al.: "The Final Days of Paracas in Cerro del Gentil, Chincha Valley, Peru" (2016)
• Communications Earth & Environment 5 via PubMed Central, Giorgia Camperio et al.: "Sedimentary biomarkers of human presence and taro cultivation reveal early horticulture in Remote Oceania" (2024)